Once again, I’m hearing over and over about how important content marketing is. (For those of you who are “young”, rest assured, we’ve heard this before and it has always been true. But for the purposes of illuminating how this works in an online world dominated by social media, I thought I’d take a moment and outline this.
- Social media is about creating communities. Yes. Businesses want to monetize those communities.
- It’s much easier to monetize a community if you’re a community member. Albeit, one with a huge amount of resources compared to other members, but you’re still a member.
- You don’t own the community.
- Communities are made of strata. Some members are n00bs and some are much more experienced. The members that control most of the ebb and flow are SMEs (subjet matter experts).
- If you – the business – claim to be a member of the community with a deep understanding of what the community values, you need to have an empowered SME; your SME representing your business.
- That means that hiring or human capital management is by far one of the most important items to running successful social media/content marketing strategies.
If you asked me to create content about baseball, I could surely do it. And it would surely suck. Other SMEs in the baseball community would spot a fraud in seconds. This is the death of any real community and my generation has a nice term for peopel that claim to be what they’re not. Posers.
